Amy Schumer’s HBO Special Will Make You Want to Be a Better Person

Amy Schumer’s new HBO special, Amy Schumer: Live at the Apollo is great. It’s buzzingly funny, but I don’t think that’s what makes it great. Slyly, Schumer’s special is instructive.

This categorization could seem like an insult, but it had the final impression of a graduation speech—a ribald graduation speech with a particularly damning anecdote about Kate Upton. Nonetheless, among jokes about hand jobs and UTIs and losing weight, the entire set is measured and wise. It has the familiar take-home messages, made easier to listen to with this crude packaging: to be generous to each other, to calibrate optimism, to adjust arrogance, to avoid judgment.

But, you know, explained with phrases like, “We need to be nicer about cum, we really do. Cum gives us life. Gandhi was cum. Oprah: cum.”

Only in the hands of Amy Schumer's genius does this creates a nodding, humanist sense of solidarity.